The Red Thaw: Soviet climate science and the politics of global warming, 1950s–1991

Abstract This article examines how climate science developed in the Soviet Union from the 1950s to the early 1990s as a field shaped both by international scientific exchange and by the political priorities of the Soviet state. Focusing on the climatologist Mikhail Budyko and his research group at the State Hydrological Institute in Leningrad, it shows how Soviet scientists participated actively in emerging international discussions of anthropogenic climate change while working within institutions shaped by the priorities of socialist planning. Soviet climatologists were among the early contributors to the scientific analysis of global warming, yet they often interpreted its implications differently from their Western counterparts. In the USSR, warming was understood less as an environmental crisis than as a process compatible with long-term planning, technological intervention and, in some regions, potential economic benefit. Drawing on archival materials and interviews, the article traces how climate knowledge circulated between domestic and international scientific arenas while remaining shaped by the political culture of the late Soviet state. The Soviet case challenges narratives that explain political inaction on climate primarily through ignorance or denial, showing instead how the political significance of climate knowledge depended on the institutional frameworks through which it was interpreted and mobilized.